


Paper Window

by revolutionator



Category: Disney - All Media Types
Genre: AU, F/F, Fire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-09
Updated: 2018-01-09
Packaged: 2019-03-02 15:21:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13320990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/revolutionator/pseuds/revolutionator
Summary: We are in very different stories, you and I, but what if they converged





	Paper Window

**Author's Note:**

> I was prompted by a friend to write 'my favourite MEP femslash ship' which is https://youtu.be/xw0ImO5fzG4 this video but I couldn't really make it work. Take it. Whatever this is.
> 
>  
> 
> For Kim.

I met a girl in the world between worlds. While I was reading, and reading, and reading, one page opened up like a doorway and there she was, palm outstretched towards me, curiosity in her eyes.

I sat there on the fountain steps, my blood running cold and then very hot.

 

“Hello,” I said to her.

 

She pulled her hand back from where her world met the paper pages of mine. She looked from left to right, like Peter Rabbit might have done in Mr. McGregor's garden. Checking for predators. Maybe just checking, like I was now checking, that what was happening was really real and yet no one had noticed it.

 

“Hello,” she said back, uncertain. Her voice crinkled and warped in the gap between pages, and it burned my ears a bit to hear. Maybe I wasn't meant to hear whatever she had to say. Maybe our worlds synchronising like this was a happy accident, like when father built a machine that did exactly what he planned for it to do.

 

I looked at her. She had beautiful dark hair that lapped and curled about her shoulders like fire. Her lips were red. Her eyes burned green, serious and soulful, with a deep intensity I'd never seen in the eyes of the village people. She turned, suddenly, as though answering a voice.

 

And then she was gone.

 

-

 

 

I perused the local book shop to find her again, and sometimes I would strike lucky. Unfortunately the window between worlds was very fussy, and only liked to show itself when I was absorbed in the story. So it was that every time I'd find myself startled out of the reverie, just as shaken to see her as the first time. I learned her name was Esmeralda. I told her mine was Belle.

 

“Your name is beautiful,” I told her, meaning it, wishing she'd take it for more.

 

“Your name means beautiful,” she replied, with a smile I couldn't discern. “it suits you.”

 

She told me she danced for money and travelled from town to town. I found out she could see me through the puddles in the streets where she danced. No wonder the sun always seemed so vivid in her false illustrations, then – it must have been shining on her from above, while she knelt down and reached for me. Sometimes I would put my hands against the paper window and imagine I could feel her hand against mine.

 

-

 

“Where do you live?” she asked me one day.   
  
“France,” I answered.

 

“What year?” she asked again.

 

I paused. I couldn't remember. My head ached with the lack of it. I traced the lines of the paper window and confessed, “I don't know.”

 

“Me neither.”

 

Not for the first time, I felt a lurch, like I could see all of the skeletons beyond reality, all the stories and labels and diagrams that made the world work, and presumably also made her world work the same way. I understood all at once that meeting Esmeralda in my own world was a grievous and unintended mistake, a rewrite never fit to be published. I knew that this meant my own hopes and dreams, my own yearning sense for adventure and my own narrative, would never be satisfied. Something had gone horribly wrong.

 

And yet somehow, I didn't care.

 

-

 

“Do you have a mother?”  
  
“I did.... She died. Do you?”  
  
“Same. What do you work as?”  
  
I paused and stroked the paper where her hand was. It was becoming something of a nervous habit. “I don't need to work. My father is an inventor.”

 

“I see.” When Esmeralda smiled, it took her eyes a couple of moments to catch up with her mouth. Those eyes could express anything and stir the same thing up in my own body without warning. I treasured her smiles. I dreaded her contempt. The couple of seconds between the smile on her mouth and the smile in her eyes were purgatory.

 

“What do you – oh, the dancing.”

 

“The Church doesn't like it.”   
  
“I suppose they wouldn't,” I said, feeling weightless. In truth, I had no concept of how the church might feel about it. It simply wasn't important in the story I'd been chosen for.

 

What was I supposed to do now that I'd missed my story altogether? And had she missed hers?

 

“Do you ever feel like you're supposed to be playing some big important role,” she said in her paper-rustle voice, “but something got in the way, and now you can't help anyone? Not even yourself?”

 

I swallowed. Maybe my tense expression was answer enough for her. We touched our fingers together through the window that wasn't a window, and stayed there for some time.

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

“We live in a story,” she told me one day, when I was lost in a book of Greek myths and turned a page too quickly. I nodded.

 

“Our stories got broken, though,” I told her, and she nodded too, a little impatiently. This was the precursor to whatever she had waited to tell me. I pictured her waiting in the cool French sun, dancing frantically while the coins clinked at her feet, watching every puddle dry up and still waiting, waiting, waiting.

 

“Let's make a new one.”

 

My breath caught. The old yearning felt like it had woken inside me, hungry after all the years of hibernation, ready to break its stasis and seize adventure. But the rest of me, safe, kind, sweet Belle – she was scared. Esmeralda saw the fear in my face and relented.

 

“I'll come to you,” she said. She pushed her hand to the paper... or to the puddle? I saw her fingers plunge through water. But then she grit her teeth and whipped her hand back. It was covered in shiny, cracked skin. Burns.

 

“You can't,” I was breathing heavy and sad, “you can't, you'll get hurt.”

 

I pushed my own palm against the paper and watched as it pushed through, felt the searing heat, felt rather than heard her cry out in alarm, but I pressed on. I continued because I knew exactly how many books in the library there were in that one provincial town, and I knew that I had read almost all of them. I knew, as well, that the paper window never appeared on a repeat reading.

 

So I had very little choice.

 

In another version of my story, perhaps it was my father who would tell me of for throwing myself in danger or his sake. In this one, this broken one, it was her.

 

I fell.

 

I fell.

 

I heard her scream.

 

I fell.

 

I wanted to scream too, but my lips were too dry, too scarred.

 

My hair set alight as I swam for that distant sky, so like my own, but brighter, clearer.

 

I fell into her arms, dirt-water evaporating on my scalded skin. The street was empty. She was sobbing. She held me so tenderly, helping me to my feet. I held her back with weak arms. My eyes streamed.

 

I looked into her face. The sun had begun to set behind her, and soon it would be too dark to see her tears.

 

“I think,” I whispered, because it hurt to talk louder, “this is a good starting point for a story.”

 

She laughed, but shakily, because she was still scared. I was scared too. But as the burning began to subside – so fast, unnaturally fast - and my strength returned, I could take her hand. In her world I couldn't read the structures of how her story was intended to go, but that suited me just fine.

 

She kissed my cheek before we headed for the church.

 

It suited us both.

 


End file.
